[Sidenote:  Adultery.]

Adultery was not only a legal cause for divorce, but also a grave crime.  All the barbarian peoples are agreed in so regarding it, but their penalties vary according as they were more or less affected by proximity to Italy, where the power of the Church was naturally strongest.  The Ripuarians, the Bavarians, and the Alemanni preferred a money fine ranging from fifty to two hundred solidi.[323] Among the Visigoths the guilty party was usually bound over in servitude to the injured person to be disposed of as the latter wished.[324] Sometimes the law was harsher to women than to men; thus, according to a decree of Liutprand,[325] a husband who told his wife to commit adultery or who did so himself paid a mulct of fifty solidi to the wife’s male relatives; but if the wife consented to or hid the deed, she was put to death.  The laws all agree that the killing of adulterers taken in the act could not be regarded as murder.

[Sidenote:  The Church indulgent toward kings.]

It is always to be remembered that although the statutes were severe enough, yet during this period, as indeed throughout all history, they were defied with impunity.  Charlemagne, for example, the most Christian monarch, had a large number of concubines and divorced a wife who did not please him; yet his biographer Einhard, pious monk as he was, has no word of censure for his monarch’s irregularities[326]; and policy prevented the Church from thundering at a king who so valiantly crushed the heretics, her enemies.  Bishop Gregory of Tours tells us without a hint of being shocked that Clothacharius, King of the Franks, had many concubines.[327] Concubinage was, in fact, the regular thing.[328] But neither in that age, nor later in the case of Louis XIV, nor in our own day in the case of Leopold of Belgium has the Church had a word of reproach for monarchs who broke with impunity moral laws on which she claims always to have insisted without compromise.

[Sidenote:  Remarriage.]

In accordance with the commands of Scripture neither the divorced man nor the divorced woman could marry again during the lifetime of the other party.  To do so was to commit adultery, for which the usual penalties went into effect.

[Sidenote:  Property rights and powers.]

A woman’s property would consist of any or all of these: 

I. Her share of the property of parents or brothers and sisters.

II.  Her dowry and whatever nuptial donations (morgengabe) her husband had given her, and whatever she had earned together with her husband.

There could be no account of single women’s property or disposal of what they earned, because in the half-civilised state of things which then obtained there was no such thing as women engaging in business; indeed, not even men of any pretension did so; war was their work.  The unmarried woman was content to sit by the fire and spin under the guardianship and support of a male relative.  Often she would enter a convent.